Unlikely Graves (Detective Inspector Paul Amos Mystery series)

by Rodney Hobson

  Hope soared more than expectation as Amos jumped out of the car. The two reporters were shouting, one in each ear, and thrusting microphones in front of his face.

  ‘Is it true? … Joan Gunstone … murderer … witness … saw her … what’s happening … where is she? …’ Words and phrases whirled round Amos’s head without connecting. As the media crew had surged towards him, Amos was able to stride past them and get to the door.

  ‘It’s no use knocking. There’s no reply,’ the radio reporter called out.

  ‘Why did you give Sheila Burns a scoop?’ the woman from Look North demanded. ‘Is she giving you something on the side?’

  Amos blushed, partly from embarrassment and partly from anger. There was absolutely nothing sexual between him and Sheila Burns, just good old-fashioned respect between two people who did their jobs well.

  A denial of impropriety would sound hollow. Admitting that Burns had scooped the police as well as her fellow journalists could not be contemplated.

  ‘Get them off the premises, sergeant,’ Amos snapped.

  He looked in through the two downstairs front windows as Swift ushered the reluctant broadcasting trio back to the pavement, working backwards and forwards like a collie in sheep dog trials.

  There was no sign of life – or death for that matter, he thought with relief. With a nasty feeling, he opened the unlocked side gate and, shutting it behind him so the journalists could not see him or film him, he made his way down the side wall.

  There was just one, comparatively small window. Amos peered in. It was an old-fashioned pantry, with cupboards and a wire-meshed ‘safe’, not the type where you kept valuables under lock and key but a cold stone for perishables dating back to pre-refrigeration days. Four large meat hooks were fixed to the ceiling.

  Amos reached the corner. The garden was very neat as far as a low wall, with flowers and, further back, vegetables. Beyond the wall Gunstone had acquired land around the back of her immediate neighbours’ properties. This far stretch was now overgrown.

  The back door was immediately beyond the corner. It had clearly been forced. There was a concrete path along the back house wall and Amos looked to check that there were no obvious signs of footprints before edging forwards.

  There was no-one in the kitchen, the room that the back door opened onto. Amos slipped on a pair of rubber gloves which, fearing the worst, he had stuffed into his pocket before leaving the car, and pushed open the door.

  Joan Gunstone was prostrate in the hallway near to the telephone, which was lying on the floor, the receiver well clear of the hook. It looked as if she had been strangled, just like Randall. Perhaps the intruder had gained entry sufficiently quietly and taken her by surprise while she was on the phone.

  Trying not to step any further into the hall than necessary, Amos lent over and picked up the telephone, dragging the receiver towards him by its cord. As he did so, the receiver started to emit the high pitched wail that warns householders that they have not replaced the phone after ending the previous call.

  Amos, already feeling the tension, jumped visibly and dropped the phone with a clatter. He waited a moment, listening. The murderer had clearly not been gone long if the warning siren was only just cutting in and could still be in the house. There was no sound as far as he could make out above the angry wail of the phone.

  The inspector picked up the phone, clicked on the handset to end the siren and get an answering tone. There was still no sound of movement upstairs but Amos was ready for anyone rushing down to escape.

  He rang DC Yates at HQ.

  ‘We’ve got problems,’ he said. ‘Get the rest of the team down to Joan Gunstone’s house. The murderer got here before us.’

  Chapter 35

  ‘Juliet,’ Amos said to his detective sergeant, ‘I want you to take charge here. You know the ropes as well as I do. I don’t suppose anyone will relish slogging through all the same house to house inquiries for a second time but at least the neighbours should be getting used to it. I’m going to do something else that I wish I’d done sooner. Best you don’t know about it. The Chief Constable won’t like it.’

  Amos shot back to HQ. Sgt Jenkins was on the desk, which was a much needed piece of luck. Jenkins was in his early 50s and was nearing the point where he could retire on a 35-years’ service pension.

  Now portly and with greying hair, he preferred the desk to pounding the beat while younger officers liked to get out a bit. He also preferred to take the line of least resistance, which meant that Amos could cadge a couple of burly uniformed officers.

  Even Jenkins grumbled at this imposition, added as it was to the two officers he had supplied at short notice to keep the public at bay in front of Joan Gunstone’s house.

  ‘The sooner I have them, the sooner you have them back – and the pair you sent to Joan Gunstone’s as well,’ Amos sought to reassure him. ‘I just have to get a search warrant and get it signed by a magistrate so I won’t need them for another hour.’

  Amos dashed off to his office before Jenkins had time to protest. He quickly grabbed a warrant form, filed in the details and wrote the address that he intended to visit on a piece of paper that he handed to Jenkins on his way out.

  ‘Tell them to meet me there in an hour. It’s down Sincil Bank,’ Amos said.

  ‘I know where it is,’ Jenkins replied with uncharacteristic irritability.

  Jenkins would have to be taken for a pint, Amos realized. In fact, this was probably a two pint imposition. No, make that three Amos thought as he spotted David, the chief constable’s running dog, heading down the stairs.

  ‘Not a word to David,’ Amos hissed.

  As he left the office hurriedly through the front door, he could hear Jenkins muttering ‘This had better be worth it’ and David calling ‘Er, Amos, a moment’.

  David would have caught Amos getting into his car but Jenkins saved the day.

  ‘He’s rushing back down to Sincil Bank,’ the desk sergeant said. David hesitated long enough to lose his quarry.

  Five minutes later, Amos was at the home of Miss Woodward, the nearest JP. There had been no time to alert her but she was mercifully at home, she, but not her formidable reputation, having retired. After the lunchtime I’ve had, Amos thought, I deserve this luck. Let’s keep going while it lasts.

  ‘I’m afraid this is one of the most unpleasant search warrants I have had to ask for,’ he explained to Miss Woodward. ‘I am about to turn life upside down for entirely innocent people but there really is no option.’

  ‘What are you looking for, a body?’ Woodward asked with a hint of sarcasm.

  ‘Yes. Precisely,’ Amos answered to her surprise.

  Chapter 36

  The dwelling where Bradley Irwin had rented a flat had been converted back into a house. Amos left the two uniformed officers in the car a discreet distance along the street and knocked at the door.

  A woman aged about 30 answered.

  Amos apologized profusely for the intrusion but at first avoided disclosing the nature of the inquiry and the fact that he had a search warrant and would, if necessary, tear house and garden apart.

  The unsuspecting woman invited him in and gave her name as Jenny Barclay. It transpired that she and her husband had bought the house with a very small mortgage about 10 years earlier. Their two children, at that moment at primary school, had been born there.

  With husband at work and children at school, she seemed glad of the company.

  ‘May I ask what state the house was in when you bought it?’ Amos asked politely.

  ‘It was a bit of a wreck, to be honest,’ Mrs Barclay replied. ‘It had been converted into two flats but the whole place was repossessed and we bought it cheaply at auction. It was pretty grim and had obviously been neglected but we were young and it was all we could afford as our first home.

  ‘We did it up bit by bit. We were both working then so we were able to put some cash into renovations. Johnnie – my husband – is quite
good at DIY so we were able to do some stuff ourselves with me acting as labourer.’

  ‘I suppose you must have ripped quite a bit of stuff out over the years,’ Amos suggested.

  ‘Didn’t we just. The kitchen and bathroom we completely gutted. We did those first. At least then we could wash and cook without staring at grime and bugs. The tenants seem to have had to share the bathroom although there were washbasins in the bedrooms which all had to come out. One upstairs bedroom had been split in half and one part used as a kitchen so that had to be converted back again.

  ‘Then we ripped out the fitted – I should say badly fitted – wardrobes in the bedrooms and then the ghastly wall cupboards in here.’

  This was going rather better than Amos had dared hope. After a bad start to the day things were rolling. The Barclays had already done the ripping out of the house for him.

  ‘I suppose you would have had to rewire on top of all that,’ he prompted sympathetically.

  ‘We had to rewire the kitchen, of course, when we did it up. Johnnie had a friend who was an electrician who didn’t rip us off and we could do it bit by bit. He’s told us since that the regulations have been tightened up and we would have had to have the lot done in one go now.

  ‘By the time he got round to rewiring the rest of the house I had fallen pregnant so it was a nightmare having floorboards up all over the place and chunks chiselled out of walls. Still, it was worth it at the end. We now have a lovely home.’

  And one, Amos thought, I hope not to have to wreck.

  ‘Did you find anything unusual hidden under the floorboards or behind the cupboards?’ he asked a little too eagerly.

  Mrs Barclay now started to get suspicious.

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Personal possessions. As if someone had left in a hurry and stuffed things out of sight.’

  Mrs Barclay was only mildly reassured.

  ‘Just some old newspapers from way back,’ she replied.

  ‘Do you have a cellar?’

  ‘No. What on earth are you getting at?’

  ‘Please bear with me, Mrs Barclay. I will tell you everything in a moment but I don’t want to influence your answers. Were there any strange smells?’

  ‘Smells? It was a bit musty in places and there was a dead mouse under the upstairs floorboards. Good god!’ the woman suddenly exclaimed. ‘You’re looking for a body, aren’t you?’

  Oh well, Amos thought, at least that saves me having to break it to her gently.

  ‘I think we can take it that the person I am looking for is not hidden in the house so there is no need to damage anything. However, I do have a search warrant and I will need to dig over the back garden. I promise we will keep it to a minimum. I have two men waiting in my car ready to start work immediately.’

  Mrs Barclay sat shell shocked, giving Amos the opportunity to go to the front door and signal the two officers to join him. A digging motion indicated that they were to grab a couple of spades from the car boot, a hand wave told them to be quick about it.

  The three men walked down the passage to the back door. The key was in the lock so Amos opened it and let his colleagues through onto a newly built patio. Their hearts sank at the thought of the destruction that they might have to wreak.

  Mrs Barclay had recovered her composure sufficiently to join them instantly but she was no less panicky.

  ‘You’re not going to dig up my patio,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s the last thing we did. It’s only been there since last summer. Please not my patio.’

  Amos wilted. He was not enjoying causing disruption to innocent lives but it had to be done.

  ‘What was the layout of the garden when you moved in?’ he asked.

  ‘There wasn’t a layout. It was all overgrown. Up near the house wasn’t too bad where people had trampled around a bit but the shed was all rotten and the bit round the back of it was full of rubbish.’

  ‘What sort of rubbish?’

  ‘All sorts of rubbish. Stereo, clothes, plates, even a half used tube of toothpaste. Luckily you couldn’t see the worst of it from the house because it was hidden behind the shed but when we took the shed down it was a real eyesore.

  ‘We got rid of it gradually. The shed went on the barbecue plank by plank and the rubbish went a bagful at a time in with the household rubbish. What was really annoying was that we didn’t get round to clearing it until we’d let the skip for the last lot of work on the house go, so we were too late to get rid of it that way.’

  Apart from the patio on which they stood, not much had been done with the back garden, which had grown over with rough grass and weeds that were kept down by the occasional mowing.

  ‘Please show me where the shed was,’ Amos said.

  Mrs Barclay indicated an area about half way down the left hand side of the garden.

  Amos walked across to the far corner down that side.

  ‘And the rubbish was dumped here?’ he asked.

  Mrs Barclay nodded assent.

  ‘We’ll start here, lads, and work back,’ Amos said. ‘With a bit of luck we won’t reach anywhere near the patio.’

  Amos was feeling really lucky now. His run of good fortune even extended to Mrs Barclay offering to put the kettle on for a brew. However, just as the first spade went into the ground, one of the officers’ radios burst into life.

  ‘Jack, Jack, you there?’ the radio crackled.

  Jack quickly picked up the receiver.

  ‘Yes, here.’

  ‘Tell Amos there’s an urgent message from Sergeant Jenkins.’

  There was no need to pass the message on. All three officers could hear the words clearly enough.

  ‘Sergeant Jenkins says Harry Randall’s daughter has turned up at his old address. She’s at the next door neighbour’s.’

  Chapter 37

  ‘Good God,’ Amos gasped out loud. ‘This whole inquiry is cursed from start to finish.’

  The two other officers stared at him in astonishment. It was the talk of the force that Inspector Amos had reopened the Rita Randall case, the one that had defeated the great Bob Winchester himself, and now he had done what eluded Winchester for all those years and produced the missing lady from out of thin air.

  Amos, however, was beset by the same contradictory and overwhelming feelings that he had experienced on the fateful journey home from the Indian restaurant in Louth: immense relief and horror.

  Immense relief that one life, at least, had been saved but horror that he had started to dig up an innocent couple’s garden for no good reason. Followed by guilt that he was not overcome with joy.

  This time it was the horror that prevailed. To stop digging immediately would alert the woman whose garden he was defiling to the reality that she had been subjected to a very nasty shock without cause. It would also have repercussions bouncing all the way back to Sir Robert Fletcher, the Chief Constable of Lincolnshire.

  To carry on digging and pretend that it was still necessary might magnify the debacle.

  Amos took a hasty decision that he hoped would ameliorate the effects either way.

  ‘Look, lads,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to go and check this out but I’ll come back as soon as I can. We still have a missing person and there could still be a body. If not, there could be some evidence that will help us to work out what has happened.’

  Amos knew that he was attempting to convince himself as much as his two colleagues but there was no turning back now.

  ‘If there is anything, I am convinced it will be in this corner that used to be hidden behind a shed. And it won’t be very deep. So work your way over this patch, digging down to about a foot, and pile the soil where it does least damage.

  ‘Oh, and work slowly.’

  This last command mollified the men, who were not so stupid as to fail to realize that they were now probably wasting their time.

  Amos hesitated again. He was tempted to take the search warrant with him. Then if Mrs Barclay objected, or her husban
d turned up and demanded to know what was going on, the digging would have to stop until the warrant was produced.

  He decided after a few moments not to take this risk. It was better to leave the warrant with one of the officers and let them plough on. If they were challenged, that would delay them a bit.

  Amos was just at the back door seeking to make his exit through the house when Mrs Barclay appeared with the promised tea. He could not barge past without looking rude so he took a beaker, expressing gratitude, and called the other two over.

  Mrs Barclay stayed to inquire how things were going and what would happen next, thus delaying Amos further. He tried to gulp the tea but it was piping hot. The two constables were naturally in no hurry to down theirs.

  Finally Mrs Barclay went back inside. Amos waited for a few moments then, satisfied that she was not watching, tipped the remains of his tea down the drain where the spout came down from the gutter and made his escape. He had lost valuable time.

  The inspector hurried out to his car, avoiding Mrs Barclay en route. He took care not to put the flashing lights and siren on until he was well clear of the house, which cost a few more seconds. Then as he turned the corner at the end of the road it was all systems go until he reached the road where Harry Randall and Joan Gunstone had met their demise.

  As he pulled up outside Harry Randall’s home, Det Sgt Juliet Swift was busy diligently directing the house to house inquiries. She was astonished to see Amos returning at all, let alone in haste.

  ‘Everything’s fine, sir,’ she rushed to reassure him. ‘We’re working our way down the street. Not much to report yet.’

  Amos blurted out: ‘You didn’t see Rita Randall? You couldn’t have missed her.’

  Chapter 38

  ‘Rita? You mean she’s turned up? But she hasn’t been here. There hasn’t been a single woman walking down this street apart from police and press since you left,’ DS Swift reported blandly.